


We Are But Hounds of War

by mrhiddles



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Flashbacks, M/M, Post-World War II, minor peggy/steve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-11
Updated: 2015-04-11
Packaged: 2018-03-22 08:26:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3722020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrhiddles/pseuds/mrhiddles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is not a world of superheroes and so Steve is left rejected from the US Army while Bucky is forced to leave to fight for his country. He does not come back unchanged.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Are But Hounds of War

**Author's Note:**

> I set out to write another pairing and only realized it fit better to Steve and Bucky when I was thinking of how to tag this story.

It’s dangerous to meet, so soon after the final days. The air, they think, will be thick with the tension of knowing the not-dead. The ones who escaped the burning and the choking, and are free to step where they may (which turns out to be quite little after all). They think it will be difficult to be unseen as they once were, before the first fights. Before the first air raids and the clouds of ash clinging to stars too far away to name. But name them he does, for he has to to continue believing that to meet is a must for them. A vicious right. One he has not forsaken claim to. He sketches the stars in his books and dreams of better worlds with skies not blocked from pollution, the streets clear of starving kids and anxious women.

The great pumping screech of the metal beast he’d ridden only twice on in his life, both times to funerals, roared to a halt before the line and out came the procession of uniforms. Indistinct, matching cuts of hair, matching bend of lapels, matching gait, matching gaunt gazes that were simply all too relieved to be home after so long away.

Not for the first time does he think he was the one who was meant to go, had to go, in the other’s place.

After an hour he drives them both home, trying not to stare. Trying not to think of how he’ll never again know the feeling of his love’s arms around him in the night.

\--

He once loved a woman with ribs that rippled the skin when she bent upwards at night after long hours of lovemaking. Her pale skin was smooth, hair reaching her shoulders in odd little shapes he loved to twist about his fingers. She would sigh, roll her shoulders and hush him, command him back to his sweet dreams. And she would stare.

She would stare into the hallway, wood dark and bending what little light there was in odd ways against the smooth grain. She would stare and stare and he thought she’d fallen ill, or would, after so much staring at nothing. It never occurred to him to wonder what long thoughts she may have had while gazing at the planks of wood. Never thought to wonder what caused her to wake so stark in the middle of the night, often and so dour.

Once he thought to ask her but she did not answer him. Merely bent her head in such a way that he had the flickering thought he’d made a grand mistake. That somewhere between the whispered words _are_ and _you_ and _troubled_ he had lost her. That in those words he’d killed her and her dying breath was the vast echo of a sigh leaving her lungs as her lovely curls swayed and dipped.

She was needed elsewhere. Needed to lead where men were expected to, and who failed every such expectation.

He lost his first great love to the war effort and maybe that is why it also snatched away the second.

\--

There is a life beyond pain. Beyond fear and doubt and the unknown. There is life inside these things as well, and he often said this. He had to, otherwise he’d lose himself in his own sick spells. But he said it most in letters over the years but the last had been vacant of the notion. Empty of any words of comfort. Within the letter he had sealed separately a sketch, a profile with charcoal marks in the shape of his loves’ bright eyes, heavy brows, unwavering smile. He’d merely said _I cannot stand another day apart from you, while I’m stuck here, useless_ and he wanted that to be enough. Maybe it would be.

But life is an uncanny creator of circumstance.

\--

He had not thought the gas to be so terrible. He had thought the wounds would be healed, and healed they were, though terribly. The tears shed upon his return spilled into grooves of flesh where not two years prior there was but smooth skin stretching over orbital, malar, and mandible.

Half of the face was twisted into shapes skewed and pulled, a funhouse mirror for what you were always told the enemy appeared to be. His arm had been taken from him, the empty space a memory of what it felt like to be held.

Once he was told, not three months past his love’s return, _I am hideous and you will not want me. You will tire of this_.

He did not tell him he _was_ tired. Had been for years.

Merely said there is a life beyond pain, no matter how immeasurable.

\--

 _Leave me,_ he said, one night after waking. His hair was longer, dark against such lovely expanses of sun-starved skin. The deltoids in particular were rounded and marred from war, the end of his left arm scarred and hovering bare above the starched sheets. He was shaking.

 _I will not leave you_ , he told him. _Never_.

This was his great love, greater even than the first, and so too did he stare long hours with long thoughts over the smooth, stretching, shadow drenched planks of wood.


End file.
